Another Woman (9781468300178)

by Vincenzi, Penny

  ‘Sorry, Merlin, I don’t quite follow you.’

  ‘Don’t you ever listen to any decent music, Harriet? Little number by Cole Porter. “Let’s Do It”, it’s called. Fine song. Anyway, that’s it. Waited a bit of a time but here I am, helpless as a kitten up a tree, to quote another one.’

  ‘Merlin, are you trying to tell me you’ve – well, you’ve fallen in love?’

  ‘That’s it. Head over heels. Well, you can guess who with, of course. Janine. She’s a wonderful girl. What an evening we’ve had. Could have stayed out with her forever, but didn’t want to start any talk, ruin her reputation, that kind of thing.’

  ‘No, of course not,’ said Harriet, keeping her expression sober with great difficulty.

  ‘Can’t believe my luck,’ he said, taking a large slug of whisky. ‘She’s damn fine-looking, isn’t she, and extremely sharp. And a wonderful listener. But I let her talk too. Told me about her husbands, all three of them, and her life. Very interesting. One thing she’s never done enough, she says, is travel. Can’t wait to show her the bush. And the rain forests. Anyway, I’ve proposed and she’s accepted. What do you think, eh?’

  ‘Merlin, I think it’s wonderful,’ said Harriet, reaching up to kiss him on the cheek. ‘Er – how official is it? I mean am I to keep it a secret?’

  ‘Good Lord, no. Don’t want to waste any time. Don’t believe in long engagements, never did. No, I’ll put it in the Telegraph tomorrow and we’ll apply for a special licence. Apparently she’s got a frock she can wear, so that’ll cut out a lot of messing about.’

  ‘Good gracious,’ said Harriet. ‘You really are serious, aren’t you?’

  ‘Of course I am. Look, I’ve always said once I found the right woman I wouldn’t let her get away again. She made up her mind pretty quickly too. I asked her just before they brought the pudding and by the time we’d had coffee, she’d said yes.’

  ‘Well, I think it’s lovely,’ said Harriet. ‘Can I say anything to her?’

  ‘Maybe not tonight,’ said Merlin. ‘She seems a bit tired. All this nonsense today has taken it out of her a bit. Gone up to bed now. But in the morning, of course you can. In fact she said she’d like to tell you before anyone else.’

  ‘Oh, Merlin,’ said Harriet. Tears had filled her eyes. ‘Oh, Merlin, I think it’s so lovely. I’m so pleased for you.’

  ‘Yes, well, I’m a fool not to have realized before,’ he said, blushing slightly. ‘Wasted a bit of time, I suppose. But never mind, we’re not in our dotage yet, plenty of years ahead of us. Pity we can’t have children, but there it is, not much chance of that I’m afraid. We could adopt I suppose,’ he added suddenly. ‘What would you think of that? Or do you think they’d say we were too old? The authorities, I mean?’

  ‘Merlin,’ said Harriet, kissing him again, ‘I’d back you against the authorities any day. But I should wait a little while if I were you. Best to have a bit of time just the two of you on your own, don’t you think?’

  ‘I suppose so,’ he said. ‘Now what was this favour you wanted to ask me?’

  Harriet felt absurdly happy as she drove the Lagonda down the winding lane. The pure charm of a romance between Merlin and Janine had lifted her spirits as nothing else could have done. She had longed to go and talk to Janine herself, but the door to her room had been firmly closed and no light showed under the door; she would see her in the morning. She wondered suddenly if Janine would let her design a dress, but if Merlin was in that much of a hurry, maybe it wasn’t such a good idea. What a wedding it would be. She wondered who would give Janine away, and who Merlin would have as his best man. He surely couldn’t have that many able-bodied surviving friends; people of his age generally spent their time attending funerals rather than weddings. Maybe, she thought, smiling fondly, he would bring over some exotic figure from his travels, some tribal chieftain. It would be exactly like him. Janine would like that, too.

  Behind her in the darkness someone was flashing her, clearly someone who had no knowledge of the dangerous narrow winding lanes. ‘Just you wait,’ she said aloud, ‘and learn some manners,’ and to distract herself from the irritation started to sing ‘Let’s Do It’, that being the first song that came into her head. Rather to her surprise she realized she knew almost all the words: ‘Argentines without means do it, Down in Boston even beans do it’ … something about English soles do it, and what came next, oh, yes, ‘Goldfish in the privacy of bowls do it.’ Well, it wasn’t surprising, she’d been raised on those songs, Merlin had boxes full of old 78s in his dusty flat and one of her treats when she stayed with him had been playing them on his wind-up gramophone. By the time she reached the forecourt of the Royal Hotel she had moved through ‘Putting on my Top Hat’ and ‘Isn’t It a Lovely Day’ to ‘Just the Way You Look Tonight’; so who needed a car stereo? She had just parked the Lagonda and was patting its wooden dashboard lovingly when she saw that it was Theo Buchan’s Bentley that had been following her and flashing at her; the expression on his face when he saw her, rather than Merlin, climb out made up for quite a lot of the wretchedness of her day.

  Harriet walked over to the car and smiled sweetly down at him.

  ‘Theo,’ she said, ‘fancy seeing you here.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, and even allowing for the ghastly yellow lighting of the Royal Hotel car park he looked terrible, ashen-pale with great hollows under his nearly black eyes.

  ‘It’s terribly bad manners, you know, to flash endlessly at someone like that.’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ he said, getting rather slowly out of the car; he looked at that moment, she thought, like an old man. ‘I thought you were Merlin. What on earth are you doing, driving his car?’

  ‘Oh, I stole it,’ she said, ‘while he was asleep. I’m going to run away with it actually, sell it to a dealer in the Old Kent Road. Merlin lent it to me, that’s what I’m doing with it. I lent my car to your son.’

  ‘How kind,’ said Theo, ‘but I wish you hadn’t.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Oh – doesn’t matter. Merlin must love you very much,’ he added, ‘he’s never let me even drive it.’

  ‘Yes, well, some of us are more deserving than others,’ said Harriet, ‘and I might add more trustworthy.’

  ‘Right,’ said Theo. ‘Well, you must excuse me, Harriet, I’m very tired. It’s been a long day. I’m going to bed.’

  ‘No you’re not,’ said Harriet, ‘we have things to discuss, Theo. Actually.’

  ‘Oh, really? In the nature of?’

  ‘In the nature of business, of course. There’s certainly nothing else I would wish to discuss with you.’

  ‘Harriet, I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘Yes you do,’ said Harriet briefly. ‘Cotton Fields.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘I think you heard. I’ll say it again, though, just in case. Cotton Fields. Fashion chain. Leisurewear. Hugely successful. Any bells ringing yet?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Liar,’ said Harriet shortly. ‘Well, anyway, I have something else to do first, and then I’ll be up to your room. Or maybe we should talk in the bar, if you think Sasha might prefer that. But it could get noisy.’

  ‘Sasha isn’t here,’ said Theo tersely.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘No. She’s gone up to London.’

  ‘I see. Without you. How enterprising.’

  Theo didn’t answer. He walked to the front door of the Royal, held it open for her. ‘I’ll see you later then. I look forward to it.’

  ‘I wouldn’t,’ said Harriet.

  She went over to the reception desk. The crinkly-haired girl had been replaced by a young man of immense superiority. He was dressed in a rather sharp light grey suit; he had a smooth pale face and smooth pale hair, and an extremely flashy signet ring. Harriet didn’t like him.

  ‘I wonder,’ she said, struggling to overcome what she knew was prejudice, largely engendered by the suit,
‘if I could ask you a huge favour.’

  A chilly, half-smile crossed his face and he was clearly shaping up some bland piece of unhelpfulness when the phone rang. ‘Excuse me one moment,’ he said, and picked up the receiver. The call was evidently from his girlfriend; he turned away from Harriet and spoke at some length. Harriet waited, trying to hang onto her temper. Finally he turned back to her. ‘Now,’ he said, ‘you were saying?’

  ‘I wasn’t,’ said Harriet, ‘actually. But what I was going to say was, could I possibly use your fax? There’s something I urgently need to receive from France, and this was the nearest fax I could think of. I live at Wedbourne,’ she added, anxious to impress upon him that she was not some passing tourist, ‘in the Court House.’

  He looked at her oddly. ‘I don’t know this area,’ he said, ‘I come from Birmingham.’ He made it plain that anyone who didn’t come from Birmingham was a person of very little importance.

  ‘Yes, well, we all –’ ‘have our problems’ she was going to say, but bit the words back. ‘That is, well, could I use the fax? Obviously I’ll pay for it, but I need to phone someone in Paris and give him this number.’

  ‘But you’re not a resident of the hotel?’

  ‘No,’ said Harriet patiently, ‘no, I told you, I live in Wedbourne.’

  ‘Well in that case,’ he said, ‘I don’t think I can possibly help you. I’m not empowered to give you access to our fax.’

  ‘But it’s there,’ she said, leaning over the counter, ‘I can see it. You don’t have to give me access, just the number.’

  ‘Which you would then pass on to your friend,’ he said. He made it sound as if Harriet was about to do a heavy trade in drugs in the reception area.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’m sorry, that’s against management rules. The fax is for residents only,’ he added carefully.

  ‘But I’m not going to be using it all night,’ said Harriet. ‘I just want to receive one thing.’

  ‘Yes, but while you’re using it, a resident can’t. You must see that.’

  ‘Look,’ said Harriet. ‘It’s eleven thirty at night. I don’t see a lot of residents milling about and certainly not waving bits of paper they want to fax. It will take roughly thirty seconds to do this. Please, it’s very important.’

  ‘I’m sorry, but I really am not empowered to break management rules,’ he said. ‘They are very clear and – Ah, good evening, Mr Buchan, sir, can I get you anything?’

  Harriet hadn’t seen Theo reappear behind her; shit, he must have heard the whole humiliating episode.

  ‘I cannot imagine that I’d want anything at all that you could get me,’ said Theo in the heavy voice that made his staff the world over extremely nervous, and indeed start planning alternative employment immediately. ‘Harriet, I have a fax upstairs, you can use that.’

  ‘I’d rather use this one,’ said Harriet firmly.

  ‘Well, you’re not going to be allowed to. Clearly. Some piss-pathetic management rule, I seemed to understand. So it’s mine or nothing.’

  Harriet looked at him. Behind the heaviness, the seriousness, there was a sparkle in the dark eyes; he had her, and he knew it. She felt furiously angry: with the young man, with herself for not handling him better, with management for having the stupid rule, but most of all with Theo for finding her at such a disadvantage and using it. ‘Couldn’t you – couldn’t you ask him if you could use it? For me?’ she said.

  ‘Now why should I want to do that? They charge the earth, these people, for doing absolutely nothing. It would add a tenner, I daresay, to my bill, with VAT and God knows what.’

  ‘I’ll give you a tenner,’ said Harriet desperately.

  ‘Well, that would be interesting. But our young friend here would still know he was breaking his management rules. I imagine he would find that very difficult. Unethical even. No, you’d better use mine. Oh come along, Harriet, for Christ’s sake. Get me a bottle of brandy sent up, would you?’ he added to the young man. ‘And let me have your name. I would hate to inadvertently employ you in one of my companies at some future date.’

  ‘Poor little sod,’ he said as they walked into his suite. ‘Shitting bricks down there I should think.’

  ‘How unlike you to show such concern,’ said Harriet, ‘and I don’t know why you should either. He was horrible.’

  ‘I agree. But it really wasn’t entirely his own fault, I suppose. He had certain genetic and educational disadvantages to overcome.’

  ‘Theo, don’t be altruistic. It doesn’t agree with you.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. I think I’m being fairly altruistic, letting you use my fax machine. Now then, what is it you want so urgently? From Paris.’

  ‘A picture,’ said Harriet, giving in, ‘a picture of Cressida. Well, we think it might be Cressida. I have to phone the photographer and he’ll fax it over.’

  ‘Cressida? Doing what?’

  ‘Getting married.’

  ‘Dear God. What’s his number? I’ll do it.’

  Somehow, until she saw the picture, she hadn’t believed it. She’d thought Mick McGrath must have been mistaken, that it was a photograph of someone who looked very like Cressida; but there was no doubt, no doubt at all, even on the slightly smudgy fax. It was her, wearing the dress that had been hanging in the attic room for weeks, not the veil to be sure, but it was Cressida’s hair, her bloody perfect blonde hair, thought Harriet, falling loosely on her shoulders, Cressida’s face, smiling joyously up at the man whose hand she was holding, Cressida’s pretty profile with its just turned-up nose, its neatly carved little chin, Cressida’s tall, slender body, frozen forever in its joyous flight down the endless steps that led down from the great south door of Sacré-Coeur. She held not a traditional bouquet but a small bunch of what looked like sweet peas; her bridegroom (if such he was) was classically French-looking, with a darkly handsome, scrunched-up face and black curly hair, and he wore not a morning coat but a dark suit, over a white collarless shirt, open at the neck. There seemed to be no wedding guests with them, but small groups of tourists were staring at them, smiling benevolently; and around their heads, and on the steps below them, were the omnipresent, unconcerned pigeons of Paris.

  ‘Dear God,’ said Theo. ‘Dear, dear God.’

  ‘Theo,’ said Harriet, ‘Theo, at least try and think of something else to say.’

  ‘I can’t. I really can’t. It is her, isn’t it? There’s no doubt at all.’

  Harriet looked at him. He seemed very shaken. ‘No, no doubt. It’s totally nightmarish, isn’t it? I feel absolutely shattered by the whole thing. Apparently the name she gave the photographer was Eloise Renaud. Maybe if we went through all the directories or something.’

  ‘Hardly an unusual name. It would take forever.’

  ‘Well, maybe we should go over there, see the priest at Sacré-Coeur – how did they manage to arrange that, it’s a huge cathedral for God’s sake – get the name of the man. Who doesn’t seem quite dressed for the part, I must say.’

  ‘Yes, we could. Obviously we should. We have to. But not tonight. I’ll take my plane over early in the morning.’ There was a silence while he looked at her. ‘I don’t think we tell your parents, do you?’

  ‘God, no,’ said Harriet with a shudder. ‘All right, Theo, yes, that would be best. We’ll wait till the morning. I’ll just ring Mick McGrath, say thank you.’

  ‘OK. Drink?’

  ‘Coffee’d be good.’

  She phoned Mick. ‘Thank you. It’s a nice picture. Are they going to use it?’

  ‘No. No they’re not. Look, if there’s anything I can do –’

  ‘There might be. I’ll be over in the morning. I’ll ring you then.’

  ‘Yeah, OK. I tell you, Harriet, this is one weird business.’

  ‘Oh, Mick,’ said Harriet, ‘tell me about it.’

  She put the phone down, stared at Theo. Somehow, briefly, he had ceased to be her enemy, had become divorced from any past they migh
t have had, was simply her travelling companion in this strange new journey.

  ‘You OK?’

  ‘Yes. Yes I think so.’

  He poured them both a coffee from the big jug that had arrived with his bottle of Martel Cordon Bleu. ‘What the hell was she up to?’ he said. ‘What the hell?’

  ‘Theo, I don’t know. I can’t make any sense of it. Any sense at all. OK, she wasn’t quite the Miss Goody Two-Shoes everyone thought but – this is so – well, awful. And cruel. Wickedly cruel. She looks so happy. That’s almost the worst thing. Knowing what she’s done to us all –’

  ‘Well,’ he said, with a heavy sigh, ‘love, if that is what she felt for this man, love does strange things. To us all.’ His eyes, looking at her, were remote, brooding; she met them for as long as she could, then turned away.

  ‘You think that’s what it was then? She was in love with someone else, with this person, and finally –’

  ‘I don’t know. I really don’t. I can’t begin to imagine. I’ve done some fairly – well, unpleasant things in my life, but this is beyond even my imagining. Your parents, what they have endured today, it’s unthinkable –’

  ‘I know. I know.’

  ‘And to think I helped her do this.’

  ‘Theo, of course you didn’t.’

  ‘Yes I did. I paid for those flying lessons, I gave her money –’

  ‘You gave her money? When?’

  ‘Oh – quite often. Well, she was my goddaughter, I was very fond of her. She was hopeless with money, you know, always getting into debt, running up bills in shops and on her credit cards, in spite of her allowance and her salary and so on. Always begged me not to tell your father and of course I didn’t. But it did worry me. I used to lecture her from time to time. Just as well Oliver had plenty of money –’

  ‘He didn’t have a lot,’ said Harriet. ‘I mean they’re well-off, but they’re not rich.’

  ‘Oliver’s going to be. Very rich.’

  Harriet stared at him. ‘I didn’t know that.’

  ‘Oh, you must have done,’ he said, looking at her in genuine astonishment. ‘Cressida certainly did. And your parents did I’m sure. But I suppose it wasn’t common knowledge. Josh liked it played down. And you know how modest Oliver is, the opposite of flashy. Anyway, he was due to inherit an enormous sum from his grandfather. Julia’s father. Serious money. All tied up in trusts of course, but –’